


The Ghost War

by manic_intent



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Kinda borderline E/Heavy R, M/M, Sorcerer!Napoleon, Spetznaz!Illya, That sort of Doctor Strange-esque urban fantasy AU, that I wrote a year ago and just found in my archives like ??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-30 23:32:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8554039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: Aleppo was one of the oldest cities on earth, and once, it had been one of the most beautiful. Illya had been here before the war, when he was younger, young enough to be taken by wanderlust. He had walked through the very place he stood now, gawking at the crowds, the tightly packed stalls, listening to voices haggling in a language he did not understand, the market riotous with colour and laughter and spices. Now Al-Madina Souq was broken with rubble, its arched corridors blasted dark, its cathedral silence sometimes interrupted rudely by the distant staccato booming of artillery and gunfire, the ancient stone thick with the stench of rot and urine.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hmm lol I found this fic while cleaning up my fic archives and was like ??? what the hell is this?? for a moment before I remembered. Oh yeah. I tried to write this for the TMFU exchange, but couldn’t quite seem to manage the prompt with this fic (Vawn asked for happy!Illya) so since I had more time I wrote another fic, Easy Pickings, and posted that instead.
> 
>  **DISCLAIMER** : This fic (and Addiction, for that matter) was written last year, before clusterfuck stories like the ones written by Doctors Without Borders were everywhere, so it kinda has a… bit of an outdated outlook on the situation. It is, however, partly written from Illya’s perspective, so take that as you will.

I.

Aleppo was one of the oldest cities on earth, and once, it had been one of the most beautiful. Illya had been here before the war, when he was younger, young enough to be taken by wanderlust. He had walked through the very place he stood now, gawking at the crowds, the tightly packed stalls, listening to voices haggling in a language he did not understand, the market riotous with colour and laughter and spices. Now Al-Madina Souq was broken with rubble, its arched corridors blasted dark, its cathedral silence sometimes interrupted rudely by the distant staccato booming of artillery and gunfire, the ancient stone thick with the stench of rot and urine.

Uneasy, Illya shifted his weight on his feet, his suppressed Grach pistol loose in his hand as he checked his watch. The man he was meant to meet was late. Granted, given that Illya was standing in the middle of an ongoing war zone, his contact might even be fatally caught up elsewhere, but in Illya’s opinion, he was still entitled to be annoyed by the waste of his time. He was meant to be in West Aleppo, accompanying the fresh strike force of Russian Marines along with his spetsnaz unit, not loitering in a ruined souq waiting for a man whose name and face he did not even know. 

Reputation, though. Reputation was another story. 

A faint scraping sound made Illya glance over, raising the muzzle of his gun—but it was only a black cat, leaping up onto a block of shattered concrete beside Illya’s knee. It was a large cat, muscular and surprisingly sleek-looking, with big, dark green eyes. It mewled at Illya curiously, showing no fear, and its tail curled into a graceful question mark. 

“What are you doing here?” Illya murmured, and it padded over, accepting a tickle behind its ears. “Better hide, little cat. People are starving everywhere. Even cats will end up in the cookpot.” 

It tipped up its head, settling on its haunches, shooting Illya another curious, oddly intelligent glance. That was Illya’s conceit, of course. Even if the cat understood people, if it was some civilian’s pet, it would not understand Russian. Illya sighed, leaning against the wall, lowering his gun again and checking his watch. As the cat mewled, Illya replied absently, “Yes, I am waiting for someone and he is late. Now be quiet. Go and hide. There are people living in the souq, and they are probably hungry.”

The cat didn’t budge, and Illya decided to ignore it. Cats would do what they wanted anywhere, it seemed, even in the middle of a war zone. He endured another half an hour of boredom before finally pushing away from the wall: the cat, which was washing its forepaw, started to its feet. Illya petted it a little regretfully, briefly tempted to take the animal with him, but even with the Marine unit it might not be safe, and so he turned to go, keeping his ears open.

“Major Kuryakin?” 

Illya whirled around sharply, cocking his gun as he did so. A stranger sat on the concrete slab where the cat had been, immaculately dressed in a three piece navy blue pinstripe suit, beautifully tailored to taper in at narrow hips, accommodating powerful shoulders and long, sleek legs, an altogether incongruous look framed by so much devastation. Staring down the barrel of Illya’s gun, the stranger merely smiled playfully. 

“We won’t need that,” the stranger added, and he had a strange accent—not quite American, not quite anything else: it sounded feigned to Illya’s ear, like a voice out of an old radio ad. 

“Who are you?” Illya demanded, startled enough that he responded in Russian. The stranger didn't blink.

“Conjecture. Go on. It shouldn’t be that hard.” 

Illya grit his teeth, switching reluctantly to his uneven English. “I _was_ told that Sorcerer was an asshole.” 

The stranger laughed—amused, not in the least offended. “So I have been called. But I’ll prefer not to answer to either ‘Sorcerer’ or ‘asshole’. Call me Napoleon.”

“Why did you just waste half an hour of my time?” 

“Call it caution. I’ve also been told that our countries are no longer entirely friendly, what with backing completely different sides of the mess we’re currently in and so on. They estimated that there was a sixty-eight per cent chance that you would just try to kill me.” Napoleon tipped his shoulders into a light shrug, and got to his feet. “Come along, then.” 

“The Sorcerer is not meant to be part of any country,” Illya said warily. Oleg would need to hear of this. 

“Yes, I know that. But I _was_ born in Missouri, dogs’ years ago, and my American contact told me that it might be enough for you to take offence at my existence.” Napoleon smiled as he said it, playfully, mirth making a pretty picture of his strikingly handsome face.

“I _am_ taking offence at your existence,” Illya muttered, fighting the sudden urge to clench his hands, “But it is not because of where you were born.”

Napoleon sighed. “Trading barbs is all very exciting, but either we move along, or you head back to the spetsnaz, and I petition the UN for another specialist.” 

Illya thought this over, actually growing annoyed. He hadn’t been ordered to work with the Sorcerer, only, technically, to meet with him and find out what he wanted. But to leave now was going to be a little childish, and besides, Illya supposed that he was also becoming… curious. “Fine. Where are we going?”

“Oh, excellent.” Napoleon sketched a large rectangle in the air, murmuring a word that pinged an odd, atonal note, a dissonant sound that made Illya’s teeth ache for a second, and the world before Napoleon seemed to _shimmer_ , like a ripple through a plane of still water. And then the rectangle was now a door of black oak, with a steel ring for a doorknob. Napoleon set his hand on it, twisting, and pulling it open with a groaning, creaking sound, bracing his feet, revealing a disorienting opening into what looked like a cluttered French apartment right out of a film—elegant mahogany furniture, plush carpeting, leather-bound books, even sketches and paintings, tiled thickly on the walls. 

“After you,” Napoleon invited, and though he smiled faintly, the laughter and challenge was all in his eyes. Illya set his jaw, lifting his chin, defiantly refusing to be remotely afraid. Or impressed. Napoleon noticed—his smile widened—and so Illya curled his mouth into a forbidding sneer by way of response, refusing to be charmed, and stepped through the door.

1.0.

“Why,” Illya complained in his thickly accented English, “Are we even still fighting _Nazis_ in this _day and age_? There is _already_ war going on. With _ISIL_.”

“No doubt you can avail them of your opinion when you beat them into submission.” Napoleon was beginning to regret not having more specific about his request to the UN. When he had asked them for a ~~helper monkey~~ specialist assistant familiar with Aleppo, he should probably also have mentioned that he wanted someone considerably less caustic, opinionated and/or prone to psychotic tantrums. Illya had already lowkey threatened him with violence twice, which was, in Napoleon's experience, a bit of a novelty. _Usually_ , at least at the start, his assistants tended to be overawed enough to be respectful.

Illya glowered at him, an angry scowl that somehow did not in any way make him less ridiculously handsome. Illya was _gorgeous_ in a way that defied common description: in a more refined age, poets would have fallen over themselves to compose verses of the ice of his eyes, the achingly perfect symmetry of his jaw. He was very tall—those mile-long legs—and golden-haired and graceful rather than gangly, even in the all black formless kevlar of his spetsnaz uniform. Napoleon had survived a World War; he had lived through depressions, civil rights movements and the rise and fall of governments… but he had met no one as beautiful as Illya, prickly as the spetsnaz agent clearly was.

“And this… where is _this_?”

“I’ve told you before,” Napoleon said patiently. “Three times now.” 

“And each time you made no sense.”

“All right.” Napoleon pinched the bridge of his nose. “Again from the top. We’re still in Syria. But not really.” 

He paused with a foot on the bottom step of the escalator, its black-toothed stair frozen into immobility and caked with dirt, dust and shattered fragments of plaster. Across a dark gap was its twin, albeit choked across the base with stone rubble and twisted steel. A yawning gap of jagged glass sat above where a glass ceiling had once been, and the glass rails that looped off each floor were cracked or shattered, the ceilings loose with exposed wiring and broken plasterboard. The shops that had once thickly seeded the walls were empty, long looted: signage that had once been backlit and brightly coloured sat dark, filmed with dust. 

“This time we arrived _very_ quickly at the part I do not understand.” Illya said sardonically.

“Have you seen oil poured on water?” Napoleon forced himself to have some patience. His _last_ assistant had been nowhere _near_ this difficult, a young woman ‘volunteered’ to him by MI6. Granted, her father had been a scientist and she had been trained as a mechanic, so perhaps her mind had been more flexible than an angry spetsnaz agent's. 

“Yes. Oil floats on top.” 

“This place is the same. Think of the world floating up top as the Prime. Prime reality, where most people live. This world below is… hm, let’s just call it the Underworld. That’s generally the name for it, in most human myths. It’s effectively an adjoining parasitic reality that overlaps with the Prime here and there, and often gives rise to what people think are ghost sightings, hauntings and the like. Usually it’s quite minimal. Sometimes it isn’t. Still following me so far?” 

“You are trying to tell me that heaven and hell exist?”

“No. Not at all. Human belief has a certain psychic power. When people die, especially when they die _violently_ , they… add to the water, shall we say. The wounds their deaths create in the fabric of the world are deeper. Usually, the rooms you see in the Underworld are murky at the edges, incomplete. Any… echoes you find are trapped and mostly harmless. But with the amount of suffering going on up top right now…” Napoleon spread his arms, wordless encompassing the ruined mall. 

Illya mulled this over. “So we are standing in a… shadow wound of the world… to hunt ‘echoes’ or Nazis?”

“Probably both. Somehow, they’ve managed to open a door into the Underworld, and they’re moving around inside it without tripping any of my wards. All that _I_ know is that they’re in Aleppo-Below. That’s where you come in.” 

“I was told you needed a specialist who knew his or her way around Aleppo.” Illya nodded curtly. “But why a specialist?” 

“‘Specialists’, or people with an inexplicable, ‘special’ ability—great strength, in your case—are people who are touched by the Underworld in some way. Maybe your parents walked through an overlap at some point in their lives, maybe it was something else. It’s easier for me to bring people like you through.”

“America has specialists. Why didn’t your contact give you one?”

“I petition the _UN_ whenever I need help with something, not the Americans,” Napoleon corrected. “Presumably they draw lots and the loser has to cough up a volunteer. I don’t know. Nor do I really care. Technically I still hold American citizenship, which is why Langley likes to try and poke its nose into my business now and then.” 

“And these Nazis. Are probably also specialists?” 

“Most likely, yes. But you don’t need to worry about that,” Napoleon added confidently. “I just need you to help me figure out how to find them in here. Given that my wards aren’t working.” 

Illya let out an irritated sigh. “Aleppo is _big city_ , Mister Sorcerer. You were born in Missouri, yes? Aleppo is _twice the size_ of Jefferson City.” 

“Yes, yes,” Napoleon said absently. “But I was repeatedly assured by your handler that you are entirely qualified for impossible jobs, and so on, so here we are.” 

This got him another glare, but instead of another sardonic jibe, Illya looked around them, slowly. “We were in a study before. What was that?” 

“Bit of a pocket conceit,” Napoleon admitted. “It’s my home. I found the copy of the Yves Saint Laurent apartment in the Underworld and fixed it up a little. I thought it might’ve been a more comfortable location to give you a debrief before we came back out to Aleppo-Below.”

“So have you been here? Searching for Nazis? By yourself?”

“Why, of course. If I can avoid having to deal with the UN, I generally prefer to. No offence.” 

“None taken,” Illya’s lip curled again, briefly. “So what made you think that they are here?” 

“I picked up their trail through my Prime contacts a few weeks ago. They entered the Underworld through a bombed hospital around Idlib-“ 

“Bombed? By who?”

Napoleon shrugged. That was the sort of fine detail that he usually left to his temporary assistants where possible. “Does it matter? Especially to the people who died? In any case, the Nazis used the chaos sowed to force open a door. _That_ , I felt. I followed them through but they were moving east. I tracked them to Aleppo and lost them. They were leapfrogging through hotspots—places with a greater concentration of psychic pain, shall we say.” 

Illya thought this over, then named a series of three locations. Napoleon nodded at each, and Illya mulled this over before saying abruptly, “So. Places with civilian casualties, in particular. Especially children.” 

“The places where children die tend to have greater wounds.” 

“Is there a difference?” At Napoleon’s little frown, Illya added impatiently, “You sound worried.”

“These places are… darker. I would not say that they are ‘evil’ per se, but… they are dangerous places. Raw. Dangerous even for me. If these Nazis are passing through these rooms on purpose, that is worrying.” 

“So there was a difference. When you came through one of those places, on their tail.” Napoleon started to object, but Illya cut over him curtly. “You did not know that children died there until I told you. So clearly there was something wrong. Yes?”

“Sucking away that kind of psychic energy…” Napoleon trailed off, wide-eyed. “I’ve never heard of anything or anyone who could do that.” 

“Whatever it is, it is probably bad,” Illya decided. At Napoleon’s wry smile, Illya pointed out, “Since when have the Nazis made anything good?”

“Hm, one would say the Volkswagen Beetle, but given the recent problem-“

“You think they are mining this ‘raw’ energy to make something like stupid little car?” Illya drawled, sardonic again. “Is probably a bomb.”

“That’s impossible,” Napoleon said confidently. Soldiers and their bombs.

II.

It _was_ a bomb, of course.

Illya may not have lived as long upon the earth as Napoleon, but it was becoming increasingly clear to Illya that Napoleon was, at best, only tenuously interested in the ‘Prime’ world, its people, and its politics. He _had_ , however, shown a great deal of fascinated curiosity in the contraption they had found in the shadow world’s version of Saif al-Dawla, a hotly contested area in the Prime. The effects of the barrel bombs that had shattered it were echoed in Aleppo-Below, and Napoleon had found the strange metal wreck in the skeleton of what had once been a classroom, part of the alphabet still chalked onto the blackboard. 

Napoleon had made Illya carry it through to his ‘pocket’ conceit, clearing out a space near one of the elegant dark wood chairs in the red-hued ‘music room’. It had once been a metal cylinder as long as Illya was tall, and it was oddly warped, split down the side, metal uncurling from the yawning gap like petals. Within, there were still fragments of some sort of silver-gray dust, and beside it there had been a couple of skeletons, fresh enough that gristle and gore still clung to their bones. The _bodies_ , Napoleon had ignored. 

“Meteorite metal and sandstone,” Napoleon prodded the dust, his tone tight with something like professional excitement. “Ingenious.” 

“So it was a bomb.” 

“Yes, Major, I was wrong, and you were right,” Napoleon said, with a grimace. “It’s remarkable to me how whenever there’s technological advancement in this world, it’s inevitably eventually tied to murder.”

“Not remarkable. Is human nature.”

“That’s a view of humanity that’s rather too dark for my tastes.” 

Illya didn’t bother arguing. Operating in Somalia and then in Syria had disabused him rapidly of remaining gentle opinions of humanity. “So… the bomb broke, Nazis died?” That would have been nice. That sort of schadenfreude, Illya could enjoy.

“Hopefully, yes.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“There were only two bodies. And I haven’t felt the rest trying to leave.” Napoleon waved him away. “Go and eat, sleep, do whatever you like. I’ll call you when I need you.” 

Illya clenched his teeth—he knew a dismissal when he heard it—but Napoleon was already tinkering with the machine, jacket tossed over the arm of one of the chairs, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Annoyed, Illya fed himself with one of the sandwiches in the refrigerator and took a shower, all the while trying not to think too hard about how electricity and modern sanitation worked in Napoleon’s apartment. 

Then he spent an hour going through some of the rooms, all of them packed to the rafters with collected art and whimsy. There was a room with strange fake sheep chairs and a Le Corbusier couch, Léger and Picasso works tiled restlessly over every available space. There was a room with a Jeanne Laurent chair and theatrical sketches papered over the walls. He ended up sprawled on the couch in the Art Deco living room, shoulders pressed against ridiculous leopard print cushions, fitting his too-long legs awkwardly over the other arm rest. Pulling down his cap over his eyes, Illya fell into the light, semi-aware doze that the spetsnaz had taught him to cultivate, ready for anything, even here. 

When Illya woke up, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Outside the apartment was a view of an eternal spring morning, fresh and bright. Illya rubbed his eyes, yawned, and went looking for Napoleon. 

The music room had been rearranged. Furniture and rugs had been moved to the corners, stacked haphazardly together. On the floor, chalk markings had been drawn around the metal cylinder, with intricate patterns that made Illya’s eyes water to follow. Curled on the floor, his head cushioned by a pillow from one of the chairs, Napoleon was asleep, his fingertips still white with chalk dust. 

“Napoleon,” Illya said, then tried again, louder. Napoleon didn’t stir, not even when Illya shook his shoulder. Annoyed, Illya considered waking Napoleon up somewhat more rudely, with a flask of cold water to the face, perhaps, but reason prevailed: irritating the Sorcerer within his own domain was probably a bad idea. With a sigh, Illya picked Napoleon up instead, with an arm under his shoulders and another under his knees, and headed over to Napoleon’s bedroom, with is rich teal quilt and thick carpeting. 

He was taking Napoleon’s shoes off when Napoleon stirred, mumbling something under his breath, then he blinked away, blearily. “Wha… Major?”

“Good morning,” Illya said mercilessly, though he didn’t pause, setting the shoes on the ground by the foot of the bed. “If you need rest, rest. I can wait.” It wasn’t as though Illya’s loan to Napoleon had a deadline.

“… thank you for that,” Napoleon said, rubbing his eyes, sounding a little confused.

“Learn anything?”

“I think so. They tried to bring the bomb through to the Prime, but the containment wards ruptured. They’d sealed far too much raw energy into the meteorite stone. Whoever’s behind this must have been a fair practitioner in his own right: he corralled the damage and decanted it into something else.” 

“How do you know that?”

“Only two died. And there was nothing in that chamber that felt as though a psychic bomb went off in it. Ergo, all that energy’s been sealed off elsewhere.”

“So there is still a bomb,” Illya said, frowning. 

“But they haven’t figured out how to bring it to the Prime. I’ve cast a divination spell on the fragments. It’s looping through: it’ll let me know when it’s done.” 

“And this will work where your wards did not?”

“Quite likely, they used the same meteorite metal in both the bomb and the containment unit. I’m trying to trace the latter with the fragments in the former.” Napoleon yawned again, then he grinned lazily, sprawled on his bed, mischievous now, all of a sudden. “Stop worrying. I _do_ know what I’m doing.”

“Sometimes hard to believe,” Illya said gruffly. 

“And to think we’ve only just met,” Napoleon said mournfully, though he looked Illya slowly up and down, tracking him with breathlessly arrogant shamelessness, smirking when Illya blinked at him in surprise. And that… that was the catalyst, somehow, for the sudden welling of lust that Illya felt, of avarice. Napoleon’s handsome face and his impeccable poise, his irritating nature and the impossibility of Illya’s surroundings. He found that he had curled a hand back on Napoleon’s ankle, intimately casual, his thumb kneading a small circle against his calf. 

“They call you the Sorcerer,” Illya said, in a tone that sounded unfamiliar to his own ears, a low, rough purr. “You can change your shape, open doors… what else can you do?” 

“I know a few other tricks,” Napoleon said modestly, and before Illya could ask, he opened his mouth and breathed out a cloud of butterflies, wrought of blue and silver light, that blew over as a fluttering wave above Illya’s head and faded into a rain of golden sparks. Illya couldn’t help himself—he laughed with unashamed wonder, delighted by the spectacle: for a moment he forgot all the suffering he had seen, all the death he had caused, the war. For a moment he was a boy again, with his father on a family trip in Portofino, chasing fireflies through the long grass, years ago, when he had been more innocent and his family had yet to fall from grace.

Distracted, Illya hadn’t noticed Napoleon sitting up, shifting closer: now that annoying smile was too close, Napoleon’s hand splayed with presumptuous familiarity on Illya’s knee. Illya knew that he should push Napoleon away and retreat, somewhere where he could breathe, away from the charged and thickening tension in the air, but instead he smiled, already predatory, and whispered, “Not bad,” before leaning over the rest of the way.

Kissing Napoleon was ill-advised, but allowing Napoleon to pull him down onto the bed was probably bordering on stupidity. But there was that _smile_ , and the mote of frost that Napoleon pressed between their tongues, the spark of electricity from his fingers, as he got a hand up Illya’s shirt and a thumb over a nipple. What could Illya do but give in, when the Devil himself came calling? There was nothing holy in this breed of lust. 

Napoleon _could_ conjure up more than doors and butterflies. Once naked, bent over Napoleon and straddling his hips, Illya set his teeth against Napoleon’s neck as he let slick fingers breach him, let Napoleon gasp out his name in greedy wonder and bruise marks into his hips. Illya had never taken a man like this before and all of a sudden he did not care: he was breathing in magic itself, he could smell the storm, like the promise of rain, he could taste winter and then summer on his tongue. 

When Illya let Napoleon push into him, pull him down, he was far too drunk on wonder to care, fascinated by the lights that sometimes unfurled in glittering swirls under Napoleon’s skin, or the fire that ignited away the hunger of Napoleon’s dark eyes, flaring bright until Napoleon squeezed his eyes shut and bit it back. The slow slide until he was fully seated in Napoleon’s lap _hurt_ , but it seemed an easy price to pay in exchange for watching Napoleon start to come undone, the swirls of light replaced by ferns of frost that Illya licked after, ice on his lips, chasing Napoleon’s fluttering heartbeat. 

Napoleon had his hand around Illya’s cock, stroking it restlessly, chuckling as Illya started to rock his hips, pushing into the pressure of his fingers, hands braced to either side of Napoleon’s shoulders. The bed groaned under their weight, the quilt tearing as Illya’s fingers clenched and unclenched, wracked with agonised lust, beneath him, Napoleon whimpered and made desperate wounded groans that Illya knew would haunt his dreams and daydreams. Napoleon’s touch was an infection, his kiss, narcotic. There was no real satiation to Illya’s pleasure, not even at the brink, only a sense of barely whetted thirst. 

“I don’t normally sleep with my assistants,” Napoleon murmured later, when they lay in bed together, side by side. 

“Oh?” Illya knew he had to regret this, but even like this, or perhaps especially like this, shed of his beautiful clothes and his insouciant, imperious air, Napoleon was exquisite. Timeless. 

“It gets complicated. You’re all on temporary loan. And you’re all usually affiliated with some government agency or other.”

 _You think too much_ , Illya wanted to say, but instead, what emerged was a flat, “Regrets?” 

“With you? Never.” 

“Good,” Illya said curtly, and rolled onto his back, just to turn his face away. He closed his eyes, and wished that Napoleon had not spoken, to poison Illya’s thirst with bitter reminders. This _was_ only a temporary arrangement, and Illya’s life _did_ belong to his country. As an interlude, he had given it too much credence: he had recklessly let his guard down. Regrets? It was _Illya_ who should have regrets. 

Napoleon touched his arm. “Hey-“ He blinked as Illya flinched away. “Illya.” 

“Get some rest.” Illya pushed himself up, picking up his clothes, annoyed with himself. “Call me when you’re ready to go.”

2.0.

Even in Aleppo-Below, the bank of greenery that sat beneath dusty streetlamps looked startlingly bright, the delicate fluted lights at the end of graceful steel stems long gone dark against the civil war. Napoleon and Illya were standing behind a shelled dumpster, its flanks pitted and blackened with gunfire and barrel bomb shrapnel, looking down a street choked with rubble and debris. A thick plume of black smoke wove out from down the street, between the two terraced flanks of narrow-windowed buildings, and somewhere in the belly of the building to Napoleon’s right glowed the red embers of an out-of-control fire. The tracking spell had led them here before it had abruptly petered out.

“Khan al-Assal,” Illya said shortly. “Supposed to be fourteen k’s west of city. But if you are talking about bloodshed… wounds run deeply here.” 

Napoleon shuddered, and tried to breathe shallowly. Whatever atrocity had happened here had begun perhaps a couple of years back, by the strength of the echo, the oily feel of it, like a choking pollutive blanket. “What happened here again?”

“Chemical weapons used. Some civilians died, many injured. America thinks it was Assad, Russia thinks it was Basha’ir al-Nasr. Whoever it was, Khal al-Assal was then taken over by rebels. There was massacre.”

“You don’t seem to care either way.” 

Illya eyed him with disdain, and Napoleon swallowed a sigh. Quite possibly, sleeping with Illya had been a bad idea after all: Illya was even _more_ prickly than before. “You asked for facts, not my opinion.”

“And your opinion?”

“War will not end while Assad is in power.” Illya shrugged. “Russia asked nicely last year for him to step down, he said no. Maybe this year we ask less nicely. But even without that. Many sided war, many players. Civilians who can run, have run. And Russian troublemakers still come here, learn how to be better at trouble, and go home and make more trouble in Chechnya. There is no solution.”

“Everyone just killing each other.” That explained the chaotic, grievous wound that Aleppo-Below had become, with spatial rules already disorganised: the world above was being literally torn apart. “We’ll try the execution site. Where’s that?” 

Illya bared his teeth, all gallow’s humour. “Usually a compound with a nice view.” 

They didn’t have far to go—picking their way down the street, they froze as somewhere beyond, something that looked like a column of green and orange fire whorled up into the sky, searing stark shadows over the rooftops. “Ah hell,” Napoleon swore, blinking.

“Bomb went off?”

“Looks like it.” Napoleon had to raise his voice—the roar of fire had turned into a dissonant multi-voiced shriek, a rending cry of despair from a hundred voices, and as Napoleon thought, the column began to distort, to grow multi-jointed limbs, to darken. “This is your stop,” he added. “I’ll open a door for you out of here. Thanks for your help.” 

“No.” 

Napoleon was so surprised that he turned to glance at Illya. “What do you mean, ‘no’? This is above your pay grade.” 

Illya scowled at him. “I don’t like leaving jobs half-finished.” 

“Look-“

“You want to argue with me, or teach me how to kill whatever that is?”

“… I’m not going to kill it. I can’t, not while it’s here. There’s too much for it to feed on, with the ongoing trickle-down from the Prime. But I _can_ seal it in here.” 

“And what do you need to do that?”

“Time.” 

“Fine.” Illya said curtly. “Do what you have to.” 

“Illya, what are you-“ 

“You need time, yes?” Illya reached over for the closest street lamp, and wrenched it out of the ground with no apparent effort, hefting it like a spear. “Stay hidden.”

III.

Napoleon’s mouth was on him the moment they tumbled out into his apartment, and Napoleon barely bothered to kick the door closed before they were sprawled on the carpet, pulling at their clothes. Illya let Napoleon have him again, on the art deco couch, and then he took Napoleon’s mouth in the shower—by the time they made it to the bed, they were too tired to do anything but sleep.

Napoleon made breakfast: a surprisingly decent spread of omelettes, pastries, coffee and scones, and they sat under the crystal chandeliers in the ridiculously ornate dining room, knees touching. Napoleon reminisced about the second World War. Illya said nothing. Bitterness was creeping back in, pleasant as this interlude was. Tomorrow, a week, a month, this would just be a strange memory. 

“What do you do when you are not chasing Nazi sorcerers?” Illya asked abruptly, when Napoleon was in the middle of talking about wartime Paris. 

Napoleon raised an eyebrow. “Usually? Try to keep any overlap between the Prime and the Underworld at an acceptable minimum. The Nazis were actually a bit of an anomaly. But there’s always people sticking their noses into places they shouldn’t.” 

“So you were… born in Missouri… and then decided to do this?” Illya gestured vaguely at the room. 

Napoleon laughed. “Not at all. I was born in Missouri, yes. I signed up for the World War—bought into all the propaganda. Killed my first man in a godforsaken part of Alaska. Lost my taste for killing quite quickly, but stuck it through, became a bit of a profiteer, then an art thief. One day I was breaking into some old vault. Saw something that looked like a large egg, with bands of golden scales. Pretty thing—I thought it was a Fabergé piece. When I touched it, I woke up Below.” 

“It gave you powers?” 

“Not exactly. It gave me the… _opportunity_ to manipulate reality in the way that you’ve seen, yes. ‘Magic’ is really the effect of forcing an overlap between both realities.”

“That egg, where is it now?” 

Napoleon held up a palm, and for a second, golden scales banded the middle of it, and his fingertips, before fading back to flesh. “Damnedest thing.” 

“It made you immortal.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s a relativistic effect from spending so much time down here. Whatever it is, after I got over the shock, and started to explore Below… eventually, very eventually, whenever I got out of my depth, I got in contact with Langley for assistants. They then dumped me on the UN when they realized there wasn’t actually any political benefit in what I do.”

“Who was your last assistant?”

“It was a small matter in Berlin. Cold war era. After it was done, we went separate ways.” Napoleon was studying him soberly. “Illya.” 

“After breakfast,” Illya said curtly, “Drop me back in West Aleppo.” 

“Why?” At Illya’s frown, Napoleon added, “We’re not done yet.” 

“No? You sealed that… thing.” 

“Somehow I don’t think that’s all there is to THRUSH, or whatever those neo-Nazis were calling themselves. And until everyone up top decides to come to their senses… the water’s going to run deep in this part of the world for a long time yet.” Napoleon said mildly. “I thought you don’t like leaving things unfinished.” 

“I…” Illya should disagree. Or at least ask to contact his handler. But he knew what Oleg would say. And he knew what _he_ wanted. Fighting the sudden smile that threatened to tip up the edges of his mouth, Illya muttered, “Fine.” 

“Excellent.” Napoleon sipped his coffee, his free hand resting against Illya’s palm, close to his father’s watch, again with that easy presumption. Illya knew that he should jerk his hand away, maintain _some_ sort of professional distance, but with the devil so close and in his blood, Illya raised his hand instead, to brush a reverent kiss over Napoleon’s knuckles, breathing in the scent of rain and frost.

**Author's Note:**

> Further reading:
> 
> If you’re confused about the Syrian war and why it started, Vox has a great primer: https://youtu.be/NKb9GVU8bHE?list=PLJ8cMiYb3G5czofUrrizDiyC_yNLOe_CF  
> Aleppo’s devastation—Before and After images: http://www.channel4.com/news/syria-aleppo-destruction-damage-historic-before-after-slider  
> Inside Aleppo—http://www.newsweek.com/2015/08/28/syria-war-bombing-aleppo-364035.html (Graphic pictures)  
> Five popular brands that worked with the Nazis—http://www.cracked.com/article_15767_third-reich-to-fortune-500-five-popular-brands-nazis-gave-us.html  
> Yves Saint Laurent’s apartment: http://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/laurent-slideshow-122001
> 
> The War on Doctors:  
> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/syrias-war-on-doctors  
> If you liked this fic and can afford it, maybe donate to Doctors Without Borders :D http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/


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